Index

Today, the 45nm era arrived for AMD. While Intel introduced its 45nm CPUs nearly one year ago, AMD struggled to keep up and lost a significant market share over the past year. Dirk Meyer is urgently rebuilding AMD and pushing for new products, and while in the past AMD has struggled with the Phenom series, the Phenom II promises to change that.

The major difference between the old and new Phenom, apart from the new manufacturing process, is the huge 6MB shared L3 cache. Besides some small optimizations here and there, the CPU is just an evolved version of its older brother. The TDP is rated at 125W which is quite high, although AMD has improved the Cool'n'Quiet feature. The idle multiplier has been lowered to 4x, so the CPU will run at a mere 800MHz when idling. The 45nm process will hopefully prevent the CPU from hitting this theoretical maximum temperature even during extreme situations